An erudite book featuring important concepts and convincing research, but it’s a text whose diction and political leanings...
An examination of how democracies have had difficulty rising, have endured threats of all sorts (wars, economic crises), and now face new and perhaps even more ominous threats.
Starr (Sociology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform, 2011, etc.), the co-founder and co-editor of American Prospect magazine and winner of both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, returns with a scholarly look at “entrenchment,” which he defines as “the making of changes [in our political and social systems] that then become hard to undo and that increase the resistance to stress at the foundations of society.” His organization is conventional and historical: He defines the terms, distinguishes between various methods of and paths to entrenchment, and examines the effects of power and wealth, stories of slavery and immigration, and the power of rules established by the powerful (rules designed to retain power—e.g., the cutting of taxes on the wealthy, the control of voting rights, the appointment of like-minded judges). The author also discusses the entrenchment of—and threats to—social welfare programs, and he comments on the notion that some deserve health care and public assistance while others do not. He also looks at two dire threats: “oligarchy and populist nationalism.” Although Starr’s principal focus is the history of the United States, he also leaps across the pond occasionally to comment about similar situations in the U.K., France, Scandinavia, and other countries dealing with similar issues. He initially avoids any specific references to the current political situation in America, but by the end, he lands on Donald Trump, who “embodies this fusion of oligarchy and populism and the simultaneous pursuit of enrichment and entrenchment.” The final pages are admonitory—and apprehensive—as the author expresses a sober concern about the survival of American democracy.
An erudite book featuring important concepts and convincing research, but it’s a text whose diction and political leanings will appeal primarily to like-minded academic readers.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-23847-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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